


Viridesce

by argyleam



Category: Avengers: Age of Ultron - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-04-01 00:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3999721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argyleam/pseuds/argyleam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walking towards the Hulk on purpose was like walking face-first into a fire. Or: Natasha, Bruce, and the Hulk, close up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Viridesce

**Author's Note:**

> A loose remix of [Hands By Which We Take Hold](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3900550), focusing on Natasha and the Hulk instead of Natasha and the Bartons. Please check the end for additional content notes as needed.

Natasha had meticulously mapped the fault lines in herself. If she had been made into a weapon - if she was a bomb - she wanted to know the wiring. She watched the way she watched the Barton children, the way she assessed their stances, the way she held herself back from correcting Lila’s heavy-footed walk. She watched the way her own hands rested on her belly, down where a scar would have been if they’d left her a scar, when Laura touched her own. Nothing that Natasha did was a surprise to herself; her attention was unrelenting and precise. She knew where all the wires were, and she must not slip up.

Dealing with Bruce was - tiring, honestly. It was tiring to try so hard not to play someone. She thought about how he talked about the Hulk - being an exposed nerve. Excruciating. Well, that was what this felt like, in a way. The words that came out of her mouth around him were stilted and chalky. They sounded faker than her lies. He would have believed her better if she’d tried harder to make him believe her, and that was frustrating, because that wasn’t what she wanted at all.

Dealing with the Hulk was exhilarating. She was so _frightened_ of him, a bone-deep, gut-churning fear. Natasha was intimately familiar with the architecture of her own fear; she’d had a lot of time to explore it, in her life. Walking towards the Hulk, on purpose - _on purpose_ \- was like walking face-first into a fire, it was like walking a tightrope over a canyon. He was so _sensitive_ to every molecular hint of threat. She had never had to be so precise with herself. Natasha had been working her whole life, but she’d never had to work _so_ hard as she did with him. It was immensely, immensely satisfying. The Hulk’s skin was rough under her hand; he always _stank_ , that hard apocrine reek of fear. He was furious, and he was afraid. He was, at any given time, probably the most afraid creature on the planet. The fact that she could marshal her cues so thoroughly that he would touch her without trying to do her murder was probably the crowning professional achievement of her life. 

Of course he was capable of fellow-feeling. Even the most frightened creature was, if it was at least partly human; humans, Natasha had long observed, were pack animals. It mattered when you were trying to subvert or co-opt or infiltrate; there was never just one person to contend with, there was the whole shape of the world of other humans that they moved in. The Hulk tended to lumber through the world naked and roaring, but he still would snatch Tony out of midair like a doll, and fling his giant green body between the little man in the exoskeleton and a hail of bullets. Of course, the moment Tony caused him an instant of fear, he would fling him into the nearest building. It was definitely more delicacy than Tony could handle. That was one reason, she figured, that they kept sending _her_ after the Hulk. She didn’t have an exoskeleton. She was so damn murderable. It worked for the guy. It extended the borders of his fear outward until she was inside them. Sometimes. For a moment. Before something threatening happened and they snapped back into the limits of his green skin.

When she had gotten a little used to watching him melt into the raggedy, grizzled shape of Bruce Banner, she started feeling bad for the Hulk, because he never actually got to take the nap the lullaby was meant for. All the good moments, all the moments where he wasn’t terrified and in pain, those went to Bruce. And Bruce - Natasha liked Bruce, Natasha _liked_ Bruce, but Bruce didn’t appreciate those good moments. Bruce was always living in so much dread of what might happen next that he was never all the way there in the room. She figured that that was part of why he never took her up on an offer she was trying to make obvious. If nothing else, seduction - flirtation - was all anticipation, it was insinuating that the near future might be agreeably different from the present. And Bruce dreaded pretty much all futures. Bruce wanted nothing to do with any of them.

Sometimes, when she was feeling pretty good about her own wiring, she thought that maybe if she could level with Bruce her advice might be: relax into it. Relax and be a monster. We’re all monsters here. We’re all just weapons who grew legs and walked off the factory floor. You can’t hold yourself so tightly. 

But then she watched herself with the Bartons, holding her hands carefully when she touched them, like they were fragile. She watched how Lila’s easy, trusting hug made something in her flinch back, because Natasha knew full well that what the Red Room had done to her was the kind of thing that could also make people other, more complicated kinds of dangerous. It was then that her sympathies switched, usually: she knew what it was like to try to keep monstrosity away from the people around you. She knew what it was like to feel brittle inside like that. Bruce worked so hard at it, _so_ hard. You had to like a guy like that.

It made her want to be different, which was - annoying, and hard. Natasha had seduced a _lot_ of people, a lot, starting back when she was a Russian teenager and the alternative was winding up under a burlap hood in the Red Room’s upstairs office with a tarp tacked to the back wall to keep spatter off the woodwork. She was good at it, and could do it without thinking, really, but she watched the way that Clint and Laura talked to each other, that all-on-the-table honesty, and it itched at her. It niggled at her sense of competence, was what it did, that that was something she’d never done. The honesty. The relationship. She was a capable operative; she knew people. She knew herself. She should be capable of doing that for real.

So she didn’t try to play Bruce. She was honest with him. It was awkward and painful. It also could have been better-timed. If Natasha had Wanda’s powers, she reflected later, she could do a lot more with them than Wanda did. Wanda was a blunt instrument; she just found the fear buttons and pressed them, and it wasn’t like Natasha hadn’t meant to tell Bruce all that stuff anyway, but it all came up in a nearly-nonsensical tangle, like a trauma hairball. She’d never told anyone about what the Red Room had done to her, no one. Clint _knew_ , more or less, but she’d never _told_ him. Maybe she should have practiced telling Clint first. Maybe she needed more practice dealing with being so badly destabilized, because apparently they lived in a world with psychics now. She didn’t regret trying to get it all out. She didn’t regret laying it out as much as she could. She’d provoked those kinds of traumatized spews out of other people before, and they were always a kind of mush of things that had been said to them and things that they didn’t really believe and things that they were afraid that they believed. 

What she regretted was the one lie she’d apparently told, tangled up in the whole thing, and that lie was that in the end when it came down to it she’d choose Bruce. That one she wouldn’t forgive herself, not for a long time. Maybe she should have chosen him, and maybe she could have. But she didn’t. She made the choice that she made. She saved a lot of people. She didn’t regret the choice. But she regretted the lie. 

She understood why Bruce left. It was the safest choice, probably. For him, definitely. But she wished that she could talk to him, just once, to tell him that she regretted that lie.

**Author's Note:**

> Additional notes: discusses sexual exploitation of a teenager in the context of the Red Room raising spy seductresses, yikes, and also discusses an abuse survivor's fear that she might perpetuate violence, much like Hands By Which We Take Hold does.


End file.
